; In this Nov. 6, 2018, file photo, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., gives her victory speech at a Democratic election watch party in Boston. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is taking the first major step toward running for president. The Massachusetts Democrat said Monday she’s launching an exploratory committee for the 2020 campaign. She’s the most prominent Democrat yet to make such a move. Warren is one of the most recognizable figures in the Democratic Party and a favorite target of President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

At an academic conference I recently attended, the leadership announced that the theme for next year’s meeting would be the socialistic path millennials are careening the world toward. With the new political support for figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others, this might seem perfectly explicable.

The Economist even proclaimed “Millennial Socialism” in the title of a recent lead article. And soon, millennials are set to become the largest voting bloc in America.

Others in senior positions at the conference seemed happy with the choice of topic. But I, along with just about everyone else under 40 in the room had the same reaction: “What? Really?”

I am a free market enthusiast, but I am unmoved by the notion that millennials will suddenly move us to socialism. Why? Because although previous generations, especially baby boomers, supposedly share my support for free markets, they demonstrate little interest in them in practice. Even while millennials will emphatically declare a preference for more state intervention in the economy, I am not convinced they are actually less receptive to markets.

Boomers are the prime beneficiaries of an array of goodies that are unsustainable at current tax levels – and they voted for them. The Medicare prescription drug benefit (Medicare Part D), passed under the George W. Bush administration, was the largest increase in entitlements or welfare spending since Lyndon Johnson, and was in the long-run for the benefit of Boomers. Social Security is the third rail of politics because boomers are gonna get what they “paid” into the system, future generations be damned. There is a reason that Bill Keller called the boomers “The Entitled Generation” back in 2012.

And these are our guardians of the free market?

Boomers are also the generation that moved into growing, successful metroplexes on the coasts (and once others tried to follow them, they erected zoning regulations to stop it). They proceeded to swallow up the value the economy subsequently produced through the appreciation of housing values, as the regulations they constructed forced wage increases to simply flow to skyrocketing rents.

In my mind, the core set of institutions and policies of capitalism are the protection of property rights and the freedom to trade, not whether the government transfers 10% versus 20% of GDP from one group to another. After all, the thesis in the founding document of economics, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, was the importance of free trade, not the relative size of government.

How do the boomers rate here? An April, 2017 study by Pew found that while 67% of 18-29 year olds expressed favorable views regarding free trade agreements, only 44% of those aged 50-64 and only 38% of those aged 65+ expressed similar sentiments.

Perhaps less surprisingly, millennials have much more positive views on immigration than boomers, but keep in mind: low migration barriers are simply free trade, but for labor.

What of “Millennial Socialism”? Perhaps this would have never arisen if third-tier conservative pundits hadn’t spent the last several decades telling the world that Northern European countries like Denmark and Sweden count as socialist. These are reasonably well-run countries, in many ways better run than the United States. Pundits kept calling them socialist; millennials listened.

A project I work on professionally, the Economic Freedom of the World index, published by the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, rates 162 countries in terms of their adherence to free markets. In the most recent report, it ranked faux “socialist” Northern European countries like Denmark (16th), Finland (22nd), Norway (25th), and Sweden (43rd). These countries aren’t socialist. They are free market economies with large welfare states.

And we have a word for free market economies paired with large welfare states: neoliberal. Outside of weird social circles, few millennials actually want economic policies that approach socialism. They want neoliberal policies like those found in Denmark, which, unfortunately, conservative boomers have demonized as “socialist.” Elsewhere, far-left punditry uses “neoliberalism” as a boo word and blames it for approximately any social ill you can imagine. Hence, we have all the subsequent confusion.

I don’t suggest that many of the policy ideas coming out of leftist circles are good: “free college” and erasing student loan debt reek of the earlier political goodie-grabbing by the boomers. If millennials wish to be better than the boomers, they should not imitate them.

But ultimately, if I as a free market libertarian were forced to choose between the grasping, hypocritical, illiberal policies of the boomers, and those of the neoliberal millennials, which would I choose? I would happily take the neoliberal millennials, and we can quibble about how far to take the welfare state later, after we all agree upon the basic truth that markets and openness work, a point that the boomers apparently never fundamentally understood.

Ryan H. Murphy (rhmurphy@smu.edu) is a research assistant professor at SMU Dallas

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